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How a professional chef can handle interruptions

One of the best qualities a personal chef will bring to your home is his or her commitment to the job. Like any domestic staff, a good chef will be willing to commit to making your life easier, and that means keeping everything in the kitchen running smoothly. Sometimes, this might even involve making difficult decisions for the better sake of the house.

Professional chef Xoliswa Ndoyiya touched on this in a recent appearance at Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts. According to Wicked Local, Ndoyiya has worked for multiple high-profile clients, including former president Bill Clinton.

Among her accomplishments was a 22-year stint working as the personal chef for Nelson Mandela, late president of South Africa. As the source described, Ndoyiya's interview involved answering questions about her abilities and priorities in the kitchen. When one of Mandela's bodyguards asked her if she would leave the kitchen when an important person called her out, she said "I'd stay with my pots to make sure they didn't burn."

Whether or not that's what you want from your own staff, it does show the way cooks can take the food as seriously as possible. At the same time, an experienced chef will most likely know several techniques to keep the kitchen orderly and prevent difficult situations from cropping up.

Time management and organization can include putting prepared ingredients out of the way and cleaning during the cooking process to avoid letting things pile up at the end, as professional chef Brigitte Theriault wrote in a piece for MindBodyGreen. That way, an interruption won't necessarily set the meal back too much.

Fill your personal chef jobs with help from a staffing service with connections to great chefs with the most relevant experience.